Neil Jackson: There's this notion of "burning a hole through the mem-
brane of the ordinary". It seems to be a great approach: staying open to the possibility of magic in everyday circumstances.
Is this essentially what is meant by psychogeography?
Iain Sinclair: It could be, it sounds like a useful description, because nobody knows what psychogeography is. It's become such a plastic term, having started somewhere very specific: a theoretical, countercultural, Paris-based, Situationist term that was applied to a particular set of circumstances.
Then the terminology vanishes, until it returns to London, via people like Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. Now it spreads out to be anything to do with
walking, cities - but the description that you just brought up, burning a hole through the membrane of the ordinary, seems to be what it was about in the first place. This idea of doings omething that jolts you into a higher level of reality. You have to re-wire reality.
As we walk and navigate, we have our
standard neural pathways, and we need to subvert them. We have to develop techniques for countering conditioned re-
flexes. I think psychogeography could be exactly that.
Somehow we've arrived at one of the best descriptions of it I've heard.
Being open to the marvellous in the ordinary.